San Francisco: A week in the life of a Medill media innovation student
By Brett Bergstrom
In September, our group of Medill School master’s students arrived at Northwestern San Francisco as media-savvy journalists. In December, we departed as budding entrepreneurs and thought leaders, having honed a repertoire of skills that include design thinking, user research, product management, front-end coding, user experience, and market research and analysis.
Here’s a week in the life of a Media Innovation & Entrepreneurship student this fall:
Monday, 11/13
We had two classes every Monday. The afternoon class, The Business of Innovation, was kind of a mini-MBA crash course in business. It was taught by Mary Lou Song, one of eBay’s first employees and now CEO of FuelX, an online advertising technology firm. Mary Lou was engaging and inspiring, and she took the time to really connect with students.
On this Monday, November 13th, Mary Lou scheduled class early, from 12–3pm, so we could attend presentations later from two media startups. Our class that day focused on our personal “Brand DNA”. She taught us to pitch ourselves in job interviews as though we were pitching startup ideas. I’d never framed interviews as pitches, before, but it changed the way I’m going to be approaching them in the future.
After class, we joined media leaders participating in the Local Media Association’s three-day “innovation mission”. Along with a dozen media executives from all of the country, we sat in on two presentations from startups that are carving out new spaces in the media landscape.
The first presentation was from a marketing executive at The Hustle, an email newsletter. He detailed the philosophy behind their email-centric strategy. It’s a wildly different space than traditional publishing, and it was interesting to learn more about the company’s strategy of delivering news straight to email, as well as about how The Hustle has scaled up with a small team.
The second presentation was from SmartNews, which is a mobile news aggregator. A SmartNews data specialist explained the technology approaches the company uses to deliver the best possible product to its users. News aggregation platforms like SmartNews can help media organizations reach new audiences.
We headed back to campus to take our evening class, Design Thinking and Research for Media Products. The course was taught by two experts in building startups: Pete Mortensen, a former journalist who now directs the San Francisco program for Matter, a media startup accelerator, and Hema Padhu, a consultant who helps entrepreneurs build their companies’ marketing strategies.
The design thinking course included one of our biggest projects for the semester: researching an opportunity area, interviewing people within that space, then creating and pitching a product, all within twelve weeks. We were guided by the design thinking methodology, which consists of the following stages: to empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, and iterate.
A user researcher from Facebook was a guest in class that day. She spent an hour and a half presenting to us on various methodologies and best practices, and spoke on the powerful impact that good user research can have on any product.
Our class assignment for the week? To begin testing our product ideas with potential users.
Tuesday, 11/14
On Tuesdays, Mobile Web Development for Media was led by Brian Aguilar, director of product for Marketwatch.com. Each of the four teams in the class was tasked with building a working product prototype using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. My partner Juno and I were busy building an application to be used for home improvement.
Before class, we benefited from a guest presentation by Frederic Filloux, currently a senior research fellow in the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship program at Stanford University. Filloux is the founder and editor of Monday Note, a weekly digital publication about business models, tech, and media.
Through his fellowship, Filloux has a lofty mission. He’s hoping to leverage artificial intelligence and technologies to build an algorithm that that will be able to quantify the value of different types of content. The criteria in his model include the prestige of its authors, the resources that went into creating the piece, its social impact, and its timeliness. Given that valuing media is such a hot topic in the current media landscape, hearing about Filloux’s ambitions was both highly relevant and inspiring.
Imagine a platform that can accurately quantify the value of a piece of media, from the cost of its creation to its potential for impact. Filloux believes that such a platform would promote better visibility and monetization, especially through increased advertising value, for journalism.
After Filloux’s presentation, we worked on our technology prototypes in class. Then we heard from two more guest speakers: Katie Tandy and Nikki Gloudeman, co-founders of The Establishment, an online publication dedicated to surfacing new voices from communities underserved by mainstream media.
Wednesday, 11/15
We usually dedicated Wednesdays to working on our group projects and studying. However, this week we joined the Local Media Association group for a design thinking bootcamp led by Jeremy Gockel, director of team development and intrapreneurship for McClatchy.
I also worked on my design thinking project with my teammate. After intensive rounds of brainstorming and ideation, which were themselves buoyed by many in-class exercises, we had identified the major needs of our community — online graduate students — and felt we could solve their problems with a specific service. We outlined what this service would be, and then I began designing a prototype of the user interface.
Thursday, 11/16 and Friday, 11/17
On Thursdays and Fridays, I worked as a product manager Intern at BestReviews, a startup that aggregates products and reviews so consumers can compare potential purchases. As a product manager intern, my job was to translate website needs into direction for the company’s software engineers. These included building new features, brainstorming ideas, wireframing, documenting business logic, and conducting user research.
My most substantial assignment was to organize and carry out the company’s first large-scale user-interview initiative.
I began by utilizing Quantcast and Google Analytics to understand who our audience was, and developed a 20-person sample from my research findings. I then used Hotjar to generate a survey that would pop up on our website to recruit interviewees, and I devised interview questions and methodologies to figure out how these people interacted with our website.
By mid-November I had successfully recruited and interviewed 13 users of widely varying backgrounds. I spent the 16th and 17th of November writing up an analysis of the interviews, specifically focused on the insights I found, and presented these findings to the company’s CEO, vice president of content, and UI designer.
My research will help guide the evolution of the site’s interface and user engagement strategy. By mid-2018, the product team hopes to roll out a redesigned website whose interface and user experience would be dramatically improved, informed by the insights uncovered in my user research project.
About the MSJ Media Innovation & Entrepreneurship Specialization:
Medill website | Video | Sign up for Medill Media Innovation newsletter | Rich Gordon’s guest column (Entrepreneurial Journalism Educators Network)
